Monday, June 29, 2015

Vaoverland and Vegaswikian: Dead Administrators Self-Promote while Living Ones Promote Las Vegas

So where do we begin?

This is another tale of paid editing and self-promotion.....Vaoverland (aka Mark Fisher) was on Wikipedia from 2004 to his death in April, 2011. He made administrator in 2005, and pretty much nobody noticed how from late November of 2004 to December of 2010 he created, then edited Virginia Overland Transportation, an article on the bus company his family owned and he worked at. During his time at Wikipedia, he also turned bits of it into his own Flickr, featuring photos of himself, family members, and vacation photos. He worked a lot with fellow Richmond, Virgina resident MPS on articles like the Greater Richmond Transit Company, though he worked on the Carl G. Fisher article by himself.



The big problem with Vaoverland is that he has been accused of plagiarism....obscure plagiarism. Hersch of Wikipediocracy had this to say:

"A friend of mine is an historian for the LaRouche organization. He was recently writing an article and trolling the net for research, and one thing led to another, which led to Wikipedia's article on Edward Hibberd Johnson. He there discovered a passage that he had written, which was inserted verbatim into Wikipedia by Mr. Vaoverland. The original article appeared in the LaRouche newspaper in 1986, and is available on the web....Vaoverland's subsequent edit adds more from the article, with some slight alterations, but not enough to make it not plagiarism. Of course, this was in 2005, while the rule structure at WP was still pretty loose. And of course, the material was added without a source, which is how it escaped Will Beback's great purge of LaRouche-sourced material, which cleansed Wikipedia of many similar infections. This one, however, remains to this day."

Here is E. H. Johnson article written by Mark Fisher, and here is the article, titled "Who Made the United States a Great Power?" by Anton Chaitkin. The section Fisher copied from is titled "Building a New World."  That's what makes Vaoverland still dangerous to Wikipedia, because who knows what sort of plagiarism he carried out using obscure sources that are extremely hard to track down.
As far as I can tell,  Vegaswikian was not a friend of Mark Fisher's, though he did do editing on the Virginia Overland Transportation article on July 9, 2009. As with Wikipediocracy's Tarantino, we have no idea who he/she/they are. EricBarbour (on October 4, 2014 at the WO-MB) rattled off a list of articles VW had worked on: 
728 Las Vegas
454 McCarran International Airport
366 Las Vegas Valley
363 US Airways 
300 Las Vegas Strip
244 List of casinos
204 Wynn Las Vegas
199 Clark County School District

Alleged IPs Vegaswikian used were: 69.68.204.34 ; 65.41.215.30 ; 65.41.248.221 ; 65.41.213.66. Was very into McCarran International Airport, changed from IP to Vegaswikian in March 2005, has since then mostly edited on Las Vegas commercial subjects, never putting in anything negative, scandalous, or disturbing about the town or the businesses in it or around it.Vegaswikian is probably the reason why the article on the Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital is a large, picture-less stub. Rawson-Neal is the only mental hospital in the state of Nevada, and used by the casinos as a place to send gamblers who have breakdowns. 

Almost as blatant as the Wifione scam, Vegaswikian has to be working for a casino, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, the city government, or McCarran International Airport.....this is local boosterism of the worst sort. At this point I have no idea why anybody would trust Wikipedia, what with the paid editing, the vendettas, the goobers who use it as their personal photo album, and the general reality distortion thanks to the hidden bias.


3 comments:

  1. With untraceable plagiarism and behind the scenes tourism promotion that benefits mob money laundering, what's not to love about the online encyclopedia anyone can edit?

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    Replies
    1. ....And let's not forget all the greasy sleaze going on in Commons; the dick pictures posing as anatomy photographs, Matthew "We have no photos of men performing fellatio" Buck, the always-moving child porn, the public-domain porn films, etc.

      That anybody still trusts en-Wikipedia is still a mystery to me.

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    2. Commons has far too high a ratio of perverts to sexually well-adjusted people. They morphed "not censored" to XXX. Shutting it down may be the only solution.

      Delete